Some mountains, I see just a glimpse, when the clouds part and I am shooting by, and some I have looked upon for days, until their shapes are painted in my soul.
Paintings are from direct seeing, drawing, or memories from Huangshan, Pilatus, Schreckhorn, Zermatt in Switzerland, Vesuvius in Italy, The Lost Coast in California, and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico. Poems loom in the Mountain's shadow. The book corresponds with 2 exhibitions of the same title at the Chaslager in Stans and Galerie Winkler in Zug, Switzerland in the spring of 23.
..
When you arise in the morning
You bloom out of sleep like sunflowers
Rising in summer
butterflies of the last stars, memories of
Waking and falling, follow you with hovering
honey drunken joy, in a swoon stone orbit only
You could know
As you put on the kettle I hear nothing but
Bamboo and wind, letting my eyes loosen and remember
this or another lifetime
We were lying on the riverside
The sky lighted on your blacktea rosemilk skin like small goldfinches
Turning the sapphire of the sun’s heartbeat when scattered by Love
while we dreamed of the same clear water,
I knew my name, the fire of
Blue
‘I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life’
The water starts to boil
Your absence the crater in the Casper
A glowing plume of ice that the world’s halo failed to burn
Lazy, full, empty, I roll into your space in rest
I feel the gravity ever so slighting recede
My blood rising toward the top of my chest
My arms leavening, my limbs made glorious by the touch
You this morning, a garden growing out through planted stars
I feel the freeing of weight through attunement to growth
The breakfast tea steeps
When you hold your hands over my throat, a thin circle of Arizona turquoise surrounds my silent voice, I imagine watching Neptune eclipse the sun from Triton, Imagining returning with the new language of color to paint in your mind
Your hands move over my heart, there is fire in the void, like the burn the redwoods await to drop their tiny cones, it pulses and lifts the echo of renewal, and the ancient forest cries fire and joy
Under your hands in my svadhisthana the sun has landed on the water and dances bronze tigerlight turning into the realm of the ‘dark blue lotus, black, lustrous and frightful’ here we attain like swimming a balance of the world within and without
I hear you squeeze the dark honey and pour the milk
The sound of the spoon stirring, sliding on the porcelain
Gravity has evaporated, I feel now between two weightless worlds, with nothing between within and without, perhaps I’ve lifted into the song of the first stars, that rivers blue light into the sky of the sky
Beyond the caves in the cosmic microwave ground, waving through the ceiling of time, Giotto frescoed with the first ship of ultramarine, Lapiz of Tabriz, Azure Pearl
If my eyes stay closed I know I will gently be slapped awake
I open my eyes, you are in the doorway
A moon and a mountain
Tea is ready
*from thy forthcoming, 2021
books:
Poems written in NYC from late 2009 to 2011 on subway cars, bridges, river shores, museums, pubs and alleys. Through the window of the hungry city: aging oceans, lonely divinity, black moons, river bottoms, unborn colors, and songs of exile are recalled and laid away. The city turns the poet upside down, shakes out his words like coins; The poet renders the city unreal through active dreaming. Which is enduring / which becomes empty / which remembers which? With paintings and drawings made by the author.
